Winners from 2019 Oscar night from left to right: Best Actor Rami Malek, Best Actress Olivia Coleman, Best Supporting Actress Regina King, Best Supporting Actor Mahershala Ali. Photo by https://oscar.go.com/photos/2019/oscar-winners-2019-2/91st-annual-academy-awards-press-room-18
After the beautiful and familiar main street of Sylva N.C. provided the backdrop that helped secure Oscar wins for lead actors Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell last year, the 91 Academy Awards returned to close the 2019 award season with a few bumps along the way.
When the originally planned host Kevin Hart dropped out of the job due to backlash from old homophobic tweets, the Academy scrambled to find a new host and ultimately decided to go without.
This is not a first for the Oscars. In 1989, Rob Lowe and Snow White opened the 61 Academy Awards with an extravagant musical number, making for an 11-minute performance that gets harder to watch with each passing minute.
The Academy decided to open with a fitting performance from Queen and Adam Lambert, who have become more prominent recently due to the hit Freddie Mercury bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody, which earned Oscars in sound editing, sound mixing, film editing and a best actor win for Rami Malek.
After the group’s brief performance, the show turned straight to business with the first award presented within the first 15 minutes. This quick change from rock concert to award ceremony set the stage for the rest of the show, as it flew like a pilotless ship that somehow made it to the runway.
The lack of host also allowed for the removal of the opening monologue and comments between awards, which typically eats into run time. However, this year’s show stuck to a strict time restraint of 90 seconds for speeches which shaved off around 30 minutes compared to last year’s show.
The lack of time also prompted the removal of much of the political commentary that so often floods awards shows. The commentary was still there as it always is, but it was rather subtle and allowed for the Academy to stick with its primary focus: film.
After the 2018 Oscars called for more women and diversity in film, this year’s Oscars did see a record number of black winners, with six wins overall, as well as more wins for female directors in categories, like best documentary short subject and best live action short film.
The lack of host seemed to take the entertainment aspect away from the show and instead it quickly ran one award after the other.
Predictions were almost spot on with Regina King winning best supporting actress and Mahershala Ali winning best supporting actor.
It appears there was little competition for King in the best supporting actress category which leads to the question if we have really achieved the representation for women that was pushed for last year and supposedly achieved this year. King deserved her Oscar win for her performance, but it seemed as though the other nominees were just there to fill in the space and added little competition.
There were some surprises with Olivia Coleman taking home the best actress Oscar for her role in The Favourite instead of Glenn Close for The Wife. However, Coleman quickly won over audiences with a blundering and comical acceptance speech.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that of Green Book winning the best picture over Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma which seemed more and more likely to be the winner as the night continued. After winning the award for both best directing and best cinematography, Cuarón is the first director in Oscar history to take home both awards. Roma was also awarded best foreign language film.
The Academy may have felt three Oscars was enough for Roma, but it was clear the audience was surprised when Green Book took home the Oscar as it was projected at times to be the least likely to win.
Slate writes the Oscars were almost a great show and then it wasn’t, which I am inclined to agree. There were some great moments with moving acceptance speeches, Keegan-Michael Key’s Mary Poppins-like entrance, and emotional performances from best original song nominees. Yet, there was still something that made the Oscars feel like it was missing the mark.
Perhaps it was the predictability in much of the categories, the missing host, or the seemingly undeserved celebration of change.
Yes, the winners awarded are deserving of their Oscars, but one of the issues with the Academy Awards was not the winners, but the meaning given to their wins. So many of the presenter’s words seemed almost congratulatory and believing that the Academy has achieved the change we’ve been pushing for since the #OscarsSoWhite scandal a few years ago. The Academy has made steps in that direction by diversifying the voters but one of the biggest missteps of this years Oscars was the belief that the change had been achieved in only a year’s time.
The Academy did well in diversifying the winners and nominees, but failed in its belief that we have succeeded completely in creating the change so many people want to see in film making. The change that people are asking for isn’t going to happen in only a year and we know that, so seeing the Academy try to force it into a year seems, well, forced.
This year’s academy awards were a step in the right direction toward what the Oscars should be, but the journey is far from over and the Academy seemed too quick to race to the end of this journey.
See the full list of winners here.
